Nurse’s Air Force duties took her to icy Greenland
As a recent high school graduate moving to Little Rock in 1957, Elaine Hojnacki found a way to combine her interest in nursing with her interest in flight by joining the U.S. Air Force.
Born in Michael Meagher Memorial Hospital (now CHRISTUS St. Michael), Hojnacki grew up in Texarkana, Ark., before moving to the Texas side for the last two years of high school.
Upon graduation, she journeyed to Little Rock, where she finished a three-year program at a nurses’ training school near a hospital. There, she received a training diploma in 1960.
Hojnacki decided to join the Air Force in early 1961, owing to a growing interest in flying. Upon being sworn into military service in Little Rock, she moved to Alabama for Air Force orientation before she left for Hunter Air Force Base, in Savannah, Ga.
During that same time, Hojnacki experienced her first emergency military deployment, to Florida in April 1961, owing to the Bay of Pigs mili
tary invasion of Cuba.
“We were sent off packing to Florida and we set up in a mobile hospital” she said. “I was deployed as a surgical nurse, on standby. We also had to do the same for the Cuban Missile Crisis more than a year after that (October 1962).”
One of her other significant Cold War military deployments was to an Air Force outpost in Greenland for one year—a detection center set up to monitor any possible incoming Russian Intercontinental Ballistic Missile launches should they occur.
On a lighter note, Hojnacki had to get used to some of the unusual Greenland wildlife and plant life.
“In Greenland, the rabbits were bigger than the foxes,” she said. “We also had trees that couldn’t grow to a normal height because of the ice and snow. We also had snow blowing in off the polar ice caps, but the ice glaciers were pure blue. We even saw a church chapel carved and built out of ice. I wound up being only one of seven nurses deployed there among other 3,000 to 5,000 personnel. We also had an Eskimo village about two or three miles north of where we were.”
As for the weather, Hojnacki said Greenland’s summertime temperatures made it up as high as 20 to 30 degrees above zero, but well below zero during the extra long winter.
“We also had about six months of night in Greenland,” she said. “You had to psychologically prepare yourself for both the long nights of darkness as well as for the long days of light.”
However, weather conditions proved to be substantially more mild when she deployed to Travis Air Force Base in San Francisco and later on to Andrews Air Force base in Virginia by 1964.
Upon completing her fouryear commitment, Hojnacki said she would have stayed in the Air Force had she been allowed to stay at Andrews AFB. However, since that was not to be, she finished her term and returned to civilian life in order to stay with her husband, who at that time was serving in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, stationed in Virginia.
The couple eventually moved on to China, where he was deployed between 1966 and 1969. Spending a one-year combat tour in Vietnam, he retired from military service after serving with the Green Berets between 1971 and 1974.
After living in New Jersey for one year, the couple then moved to move to Hurst, Texas, where they lived from 1975 until this year, then they moved back to Hojnacki’s home town— Texarkana.
“I miss my time in the Air Force, but I’ll always remember it,” she said.